Our list of the very best Apple Watch apps for fitness, sleep, travel and more.
It’s been an interesting year for even the best Apple Watch apps. In mid-2019 it seemed as if the Watch had lost its sparkle, with many big-name apps either languishing or being pulled from the Watch altogether. The problem wasn’t that Apple Watch apps are a bad idea, though. Far from it, as our selection here demonstrates. It was that sometimes, apps were designed to answer the wrong question: “could we make a Watch app?” but not “should we?” Now, watchOS 6 has brought an App Store to your Apple Watch for the very first time. That may encourage app developers to take the Apple Watch more seriously, and with watchOS 7 and the Apple Watch 6 – not to mention the iPhone 12 range – having landed, there’s never been a better time to join the ecosystem. Our favorite apps, the apps that are still here after a bumpy year, both should and could have been made. They exist because they’re useful, or because they’re entertaining, or because they make your life that little bit better. In this round-up you’ll find apps for podcasting and procrastinating, for getting fit and getting stuff done, for messing around and for sorting stuff out. So dive in and start getting the most out of your Apple Watch, and make sure to check this article regularly, as we’ll add a new app every couple of weeks, highlighted below. NightWare is an app that you can only get if it’s prescribed by your doctor, and for now it’s focusing on ex-military personnel. It’s a US, FDA-approved app for people who suffer from PTSD-related nightmares, and it uses the Apple Watch motion and heart rate sensors to detect when you’re having a nightmare. It then uses the Watch’s haptic engine to rouse you without waking you up – so it breaks the nightmare without breaking your sleep. It’s a good example of how wearable computing can be used for more than just fitness monitoring and vital sign tracking. The app works by monitoring your sleep patterns for around ten days, using the heart rate, accelerometer, and gyroscope data to calculate what the makers call a “stress threshold”. If your sleep goes through that threshold it indicates that you’re having a nightmare and the Watch intervenes with a low intensity vibration. If that doesn’t work, it increases until you’re back in a gentler sleep mode. Why prescription-only? Privacy. The app generates data that’s stored and sent securely for review by your healthcare professional. To begin with the app is available through the US Veterans Health Administration (VHA) health care system and the Department of Defense Military Health System (MHS). There’s no denying that the main thrust of the Apple Watch since the second model is for fitness: it’s packing GPS, heart rate, water resistance and improved sensors to make the most of the fact people like to work out with this thing – it even connects to gym equipment. This list of Apple Watch fitness, running, wellbeing and health apps are nearly all must-have – if you’re going to do one thing with your new Watch, use it to become a healthier you in mind and body. Apple’s family-friendly features in the latest watchOS make the Apple Watch a much more child-friendly wearable, and apps such as StepDog are ideal for younger users: it’s a kind of fitness Tamagotchi, a virtual pet that also encourages you to exercise. The app requires the Infographic Modular watch face, and it puts a cute dog in the middle of your Apple Watch screen. Like a real dog, your dog needs to be walked every day; if you hit your daily step goal your four-legged friend will retire to its kennel and go to sleep. The app also provides a widget that does the same thing on your iPhone. The core app is free but you can unlock additional features via modestly priced in-app purchases. That enables you to choose from a selection of pets including a cat – the full set of pets is $1.99 / £1.99 / AU$2.99 – and it can also show weather information in the background. The app also includes leaderboards where you can compare your step count with your friends or with other local StepDog users. This probably isn’t an app for grown-ups, but it’s the kind of thing we’d love to see more of: it’s cute, whimsical, and modestly priced. More importantly, it made us smile. Most of the Apple Watch apps in the health and fitness category are trackers of some kind: step trackers, calorie trackers, cycle trackers and so on. Moodistory is a tracker too, but it’s interested in your mental state rather than your physical performance. The newly added Apple Watch companion app means it’s one of the fastest ways to record your mood and give it context, and it’s designed for sheer speed of entry: if you want to leave detailed notes that’s best left to the iPhone app. On your Watch you just tap and go. Mood tracking can be very useful for people whose mental state has its ups and downs, or for people who want to get an understanding of the patterns that may shape their moods. By recording how you feel over a period of time you can begin to see if there are particular trends, and if you’re also including contextual information that information can help you identify any triggers that might bring you down or lift you up. You can even collate the information and output it in PDF form from the iPhone app, which may be useful if you’d like to share your mood history with a counsellor or other qualified professional. Tracking your weight using the Apple Health app can be a little bit irritating. If you use Wi-Fi scales you’ve probably experienced connection problems, and if you manually add your data into the Health app you’ve probably encountered some of its idiosyncrasies. For example, if you prefer to work in stones and pounds you can’t just say that you’re nine stone three, you have to say that you’re 9.21 stone. Vekt is designed to solve those little irritations. It enables you to enter your weight instantly using proper measurements (metric, imperial or stone), it automatically displays your BMI – useful if you need to hit a certain BMI target, for example to meet eligibility criteria for some surgeries – and it enables you to set a target weight for weight loss or gain. You can get it to set reminders to help motivate you, and with Siri Shortcuts support you can add data with your voice. It can also access your existing health information from the Health app, if you wish, and it can add its data to Health automatically. But you don’t have to enable the data sharing if you don’t want to. Vekt doesn’t do much, but what it does do it does very well: it makes weight tracking a little bit simpler and a whole lot faster. We featured version 7 of Heart Analyzer back in 2019 and liked it a lot. Version 8 is new for 2020 and it’s a very big update – especially on iPhone, where it has a brand new and very nice user interface. Unfortunately the Apple Watch’s display is rather limited compared to the phone, but while the Watch component isn’t quite as pretty as the new iPhone app, it’s still very effective and makes good use of the available space. On your wrist, Heart Analyzer v8 comes with improved, customizable complications for the Infograph faces so that you can have your heart rate chart right there in front of you. The Watch app offers live heart rate monitoring and trend charts, weekly metrics and workout views, and it can also record calories burned and distance traveled. As you’d expect, it integrates well with Apple Health. Things are even more impressive on iPhone, where you can view personalized metrics such as day/night resting heart rates, average heart rates, and historical data going back years. The new interface makes everything much clearer and achieves the tricky balance of giving you lots and lots of data without being overwhelming. Don’t let the name fool you: although it’s named after a bike race term and is primarily designed to accompany the famously expensive exercise bike, Peloton isn’t just about cycling. It’s a fitness helper for running, yoga and high intensity training too, and it can also help you with meditation through its guided learning sessions. The Peloton app offers a useful combination of streaming video classes, progress tracking, and music playback to keep you motivated. The latest app introduces a particularly cool feature: you can now use Chromecast to send the video from iPhone or iPad to compatible TVs for that big-screen experience, and you can pre-load the video to make sure you don’t encounter any buffering during a workout. The Watch component has much less screen space to work with, but it does a lot with what it’s got. It displays pace and distance metrics for runs, heart rate tracking for all kinds of exercises, and all the stats you could want. It also integrates with Apple’s Health app to keep your vital statistics up to date. The app doesn’t just connect to your Apple Watch: if you have Bluetooth-enabled monitors you prefer, you can connect them too. Strava needs no introduction for serious fitness fans: it’s one of the world’s top fitness apps for runners, cyclists and swimmers, as well as gym-goers, kayakers and yoga practitioners. The latest version brings proper support for the Apple Watch, enabling you to sync workouts and activities you’ve recorded with Apple’s Workout app with the Strava app and its online tracking, to build a better overall picture of your fitness activities. Strava is on a constant update cycle, so just days after the Apple Watch sync was introduced there was another update with improved stroke analysis for swimmers and better cadence analysis for runners; two weeks previously there were new features for skiers and for activity sharing, as well as a bunch of interactive 3D maps. The big selling point of Strava is its social aspect, which elevates it above other GPS-enabled fitness apps: you can compare your performance not just with yourself but with other users, you can compete to become the king or queen of particular geographical leaderboards, and you can share with friends and followers to get encouraging words and helpful feedback.
